Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

But recently, the Los Angeles Times took a stand against this type of misinformation. Paul Thornton, the paper’s letters editor, wrote
that he doesn’t print letters asserting that “there’s no sign humans
have caused climate change.” Why? Because, he wrote, such a statement is
a factual inaccuracy, and “I do my best to keep errors of fact off the
letters page.” He cited the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change’s (IPCC) recent statement that scientists are at least 95 percent certain humans are causing global warming.

Does this mean the Times will never publish a letter
skeptical of climate change? Not necessarily. Thornton told Climate Desk
that he evaluates all letters on “a case-by-case basis” and that he
would consider running one from a climate scientist with “impeccable
credentials” who disagreed with the scientific consensus. But he says
those letters are unusual. “I don’t get a lot of nuance from people who
question the science on climate change,” he explains. Rather, he says,
letters frequently portray climate change as a “hoax” or a “liberal
conspiracy.”

Thornton’s announcement drew praise
from some scientists and activists, and Forecast the Facts, an advocacy
group “dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about
climate change,” launched a petition drive
calling on other major papers to follow suit. “The idea that opinion
pieces should be based in the realm of facts is nothing new,” argues
Brad Johnson, the group’s campaign manager.

So how do other newspapers handle climate-denying letters? Climate Desk contacted editors across the country to find out.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post was one of several papers that said they agreed with the Los Angeles Times’ policy
against running clearly inaccurate letters but argued that this still
leaves significant room for publishing climate skepticism.

“It’s our policy as well not to run letters to the editor that are
factually inaccurate, so we wouldn’t publish a letter that simply says,
‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change,’” Washington Post letters
editor Mike Larabee said in an email. “That’s a broad absolute that
doesn’t take into account the existence of large amounts of science
indicating otherwise.”

He added, however, that the Post wants its letters section
to reflect a “broad spectrum” of views and that it has “published
letters that are skeptical or raise questions about the scientific
consensus. In general, these have been letters that we think make
informed and interesting points challenging the science or the way it’s
used. It’s a complex topic that’s no more above critical scrutiny than
anything else.”

Larabee pointed to recent letters printed by the Post, including one that stated, “Remember, had there not been climate change, we’d never have gotten out of the Ice Age.”

TheDallas Morning News

TheDallas Morning Newsdoesn’t
have “a firm policy” on climate change letters, according Michael
Landauer, the paper’s digital communities manager, though he added that
he plans to discuss the matter further internally. “In the past, we have
run letters where people express doubt or take shots at those who
accept the climate change consensus, but I’m not sure I would print one
that says flat-out that there ‘is no sign’ climate change is caused by
humans,” he wrote in an email. “It may be their underlying belief on
which they base their letter, but if someone were to assert that in that
way, I don’t think I’d allow it.”

The Tampa Bay Times

Tim Nickens, editor of editorials at the Tampa Bay Times,
said that his paper has a “broad policy” that letters must be accurate.
He said the paper probably wouldn’t print a letter asserting that
“humans aren’t contributing to climate change at all” if that claim
wasn’t backed up by scientific studies. He added that letters are
assessed on a “case-by-case basis.”

USA Today

Brian Gallagher, editorial page editor at USA Today,
said his paper has an “aggressive” fact-checking process that applies
to all letters and op-eds and that it won’t print anything that is
“flatly false.” Beyond that, he said, the paper gives letter-writers “as
much latitude as possible … to express their opinions.”

USA Today’s editorial board — which Gallagher oversees — has
a clear stance on global warming: It’s real; there’s overwhelming
evidence humans are causing it; and urgent action is needed. But
Gallagher says that none of those positions is “completely closed out”
from debate in the paper, so “it depends on the phrasing of the
particular letter.” He explained that although the bar for disputing
climate change is increasingly high, the paper might allow a writer to
cite contrarian scientists in order to argue against the scientific
consensus.

Gallagher argued that the IPCC’s 95 percent certainty that humans are
warming the planet doesn’t mean that contrary views should be left out
of the paper. “Sometimes the 5 percent is right,” he said. “You have to
give people who believe the 5 percent opinion their say.”

So how does this play out in practice? Last week, USA Today published an editorial calling for action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It also ran an “opposing view” column from Joseph L. Bast, president of the “free-market” Heartland Institute, who made the misleading argument that “no warming has occurred for the past 15 years.”

On Thursday, USA Today printed a range of responses to its editorial, including a letter that asked:

Could you please tell me why Americans should believe
your editorial as opposed to the opposing view written by Joseph Bast,
president of the Heartland Institute? His response makes as much sense
to me as what you have written.

The theme now is that so many things are tied to global warming,
whether it be early snowstorms or the number of hurricanes this year.

The American people are rightly confused, and all we can do is feel
the weather. In Charlotte, we have had a colder than normal winter,
spring and summer, so I am going with no global warming.

The Plain Dealer

Cleveland’s Plain Dealer treats its letters section as essentially self-correcting.
“We don’t censor letters to fit our editorial board agenda … although
our editorial board’s position is that global warming is happening and
that the world needs to respond more urgently,” said Elizabeth Sullivan,
opinion director for the Northeast Ohio Media Group,in an email.

Sullivan said that the Plain Dealer tries not to publish “nonfactual” assertions like the hypothetical one cited by the Los Angeles Times (“there’s no sign humans have caused climate change”). But she suggested that a letter
the paper did run this summer — which claimed that “[s]ince there is no
increase in temperatures, there certainly is no support for a
greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide” — had been effectively refuted by
subsequent letter-writers:

Our readers, who include many scientists with expertise
in this area, since Cleveland is home to a large NASA research center,
offer their own corrective to readers who, in their view, hit foul balls
in this arena. The July 15 [letter] you cite … was challenged by
several readers in letters that we published in the following week. One
of those letters noted that the July 15 letter writer did not provide
specific data to back up his assertions, then discussed in detail the
way long-since-discredited data are often used to support such
assertions. This pattern tends to repeat itself when we carry letters
and columns on this topic.

The Houston Chronicle

Jeff Cohen, executive editor, opinions and editorials, for The Houston Chronicle, has
a similar take. “Letters columns are reflective of the community’s
opinion, and, occasionally, even ill-informed writers get their say in
print,” he said. “The letters are a continuing dialogue, and you hope
that maybe the next one you receive corrects or addresses the issues
that are contentious in the previous one.” Cohen added: “The goal is to
provide a venue for the varying voices of Houston. The editorial page
and the letters column is the marketplace of ideas. It’s the place where
we have debates … A debate often happens because a wrong idea has been
put forward.”

The Denver Post

“We will publish letters skeptical that humans are causing climate change, depending on what the rest of the content is,” said Denver Post
editorial page editor Vincent Carroll in an email. In January, his
paper ran a letter arguing that human-caused global warming is a “scam” perpetrated by “long-discredited propagandists” seeking to protect their government funding.

Carroll expanded on his answer in a column
Friday, writing that he is “reluctant to shut down reader discussion on
issues in which most scientists may share similar views.” Carroll
referenced a debate that took place in the Post’s letters
section following the paper’s publication of a July column in which
Charles Krauthammer criticized President Obama’s climate policy:

Over a period of weeks, we published letters back and
forth in reaction, covering issues such as the reliability of climate
models, degree of scientific consensus and natural climate variability.

Most skeptics of any sophistication recognize that global warming has
occurred and appreciate that some or much of it in recent decades could
be caused by human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. But they tend to
believe, for example, that there are more uncertainties in the science
than generally conceded, that the relative dearth of warming over the
past 15 or more years is a blow to the models and that the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has demonstrated consistent
bias in favor of alarmist interpretations.

Surely readers should be free to debate such points.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Asked on Twitter if his paper would “follow suit” after the Los Angeles Times announced its policy on climate change letters, San Diego Union-Tribune editorial and opinion director William Osborne responded, “No,” and added that his paper would “continue to print a full range of views on all issues.”

Osborne subsequently elaborated over email: “We have always followed a
policy of not publishing material in the newspaper that we know to be
factually inaccurate; that’s nothing new for us, nor, I suspect, most
newspapers. And, yes, we will continue to publish a full range of views
on all issues. Those policies are not mutually exclusive.” Asked whether
he considered the example cited by the Times — “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” — to be factually inaccurate, Osborne responded:

Yes, I do consider it to be factually inaccurate. I
subsequently had a discussion with our letters editor to reaffirm our
policy.

And, to be clear, the editorial position of this paper for some time
now has been that we accept the science that says the globe is getting
warmer, and that it is caused in part by human activity. The question,
in our view, is what to do about it. Reasonable people will differ about
that, as the lack of action by Congress and many governments throughout
the world demonstrates.